Chinese neologisms: Word Formation Strategies in Chinese

This paper presents some central word-formation strategies in Chinese by mainly focusing on compound words and word-formation patterns emerging as a result of the central role played by compounding in Chinese. In fact, while in some languages compounding is a peripheral word-formation strategy, in Chinese it is the most productive means of word-formation. This emerges clearly from the corpus of neologisms developed over the last thirty years included in The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (CCD) (2002) where out of 709 new words (those with no more than two syllables) almost 95 percent (672) are compounds, while only a little more than two percent (16) are derived words.The formation of compound words in Chinese has been discussed recently by Huang (1998), Packard (2000), Ceccagno and Scalise (2006, 2007), Ceccagno (2007), Ceccagno and Basciano (2007, 2009a, 2009b). The word-formation processes in Chinese discussed in this paper are (1) metacompounding, or compound words whose constituents are truncated forms of underlying compounds; (2) neologisms coined from previous constituents of metacompounds; (3) re-analysis of syllables from polysyllabic words, loanwords, calques and hybrids as morphemes, and the resulting new morphemes; (4) monosyllabic neologisms coined as loanwords; (5) neologisms formed through the re-analysis of the semantics of the constituents of existing compound words, and (6) neologisms coined on the internet that intentionally aim at breaking the prevailing word-formation strategies.